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TV newsreaders have seen the biggest fall in trust over the past year among UK professions listed in an annual survey.

The Ipsos Mori Veracity Index, which lists the most and least trusted professions in the UK, shows that trust in TV newsreaders “to tell the truth” has fallen by five per cent to 62 per cent in 2018.

Separately, journalists remain among the five least-trusted professions, coming above only ad executives, politicians and Government ministers.

They have dropped by one per cent over the past year and are now trusted by 26 per cent of people to tell the truth, the survey found.

But, Channel 4 News political correspondent Michael Crick questioned the logic of the statistics on Twitter.

He said: “So TV newsreaders are trusted to tell the truth by 62 per cent, but journalists by only 26 per cent. So who do the public think writes what the newsreaders read?”

Journalists are more trusted by Labour supporters (31 per cent) than Conservative supporters (24 per cent), and also more by Remain supporters (30 per cent) than Leave supporters (23 per cent), the results show.

Trust in journalists has improved since the survey began in 1983 when only 19 per cent of Britons trusted them to tell the truth.

Gideon Skinner, research director at Ipsos Mori, said: “Our long-running Veracity Index allows us to analyse one important aspect of the complex issue of trust in our society and shows that simplistic narratives that ‘trust is in crisis’ need to be unpacked.

“Our data shows that for many professions, public trust that they will tell the truth has actually been rising over time, both for those at the top of the scale, such as teachers and scientists, and for those nearer the bottom, such as bankers and journalists.”

The top five most trusted professions, in descending order, were nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and professors.

Ipsos Mori interviewed 1,001 adults (aged 15 plus) across Great Britain between 12 and 21 October for the survey.

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I work for a firm (Edelman) that has been running a trust survey for 19 years. I can answer Michael’s question: trust in newsreaders is in line with trust in broadcast news which runs between 60% and two-thirds most of the time; trust in “journalists” is much lower because it includes newspapers as well as broadcast and this is the rough average. It isn’t as simple as that, but broadly speaking trust of the press and of “internet journalists” is far lower; in telly and radio it is higher and when you ask people about their overall trust in media it is usually somewhere in the range of 24 to 36%. The number quoted in this piece is on the low side, but not out of the range. In fact, in our last survey, trust in traditional journalists – as opposed to “internet journalists” – jumped by 13 per centage points (albeit only from a very low base of 26%). This was almost certainly a reaction to the debate around “fake news”. In the UK, we trust journalists much less than other European countries or the US and Canada. This is not because of “fake news”; it is because of what you might call “junk journalism”. Our press pays a price in trust for being “robust”, “rumbustious” or whatever the appropriate adjective is. Whether that price ends up being the difference between commercial survival and oblivion, I suppose, in the age-honoured way of casting off a long boring comment piece, only time will tell.